Grading PolitiFact: Fred Upton and "rising gas prices"

Context matters -- We examine the claim in the full context, the comments made before and after it, the question that prompted it, and the point the person was trying to make.
--Principles of PolitiFact and the Truth-O-Meter

 The issue:

Right away one wonders:  Is Upton saying the bill will "help" stop rising gas prices (top) or is he saying saying the bill "will" stop rising gas prices?  Doesn't PolitiFact detect a difference?

The fact checkers:

Louis Jacobson:  writer, researcher
Bill Adair:  editor

Analysis:

The question that arose from the title blurbs is magnified and expanded right away in the following story:

To hear Reps. Fred Upton and Ed Whitfield talk about their new energy bill, you'd think it will prevent gas prices from increasing before your next fill-up.

Upton, the Michigan Republican who chairs the influential Energy and Commerce Committee, and Ed Whitfield, the Kentucky Republican who heads the Energy and Power subcommittee, recently argued in a letter to fellow lawmakers that one way to stop rising gas prices would be to pass the Energy Tax Prevention Act of 2011 (H.R. 910).

PolitiFact views the statement from Upton and Whitfield as claiming that prices would pretty much immediately freeze with passage of the bill.

I'll try to interpret that as hyperbole.  Which, of course, leaves the ambiguity from the title blurbs intact unless the hyperbole explanation falls apart.

PolitiFact:

The bill grows out of longstanding frustration by industry groups and lawmakers who believe that Environmental Protection Agency regulations unnecessarily burden many companies.

The measure -- which Whitfield’s subcommittee approved on March 10, 2011, and which now heads to the full committee -- would prevent the EPA from regulating greenhouse gases for the purpose of addressing climate change.

The above two paragraphs represent an oasis of accuracy.  It's always nice to run across such things in a PolitiFact story.

Now for the nuts and bolts of Upton's claim and the associated fact check.  PolitiFact uses three paragraphs to quote material from the Upton/Whitfield letter.  The quotations contain ellipses, so rather than quoting all three paragraphs I'll instead quote directly from the letter, using yellow highlights to identify the portions quoted by PolitiFact: